The Wisdom of Brian Joiner

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Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

The Wisdom of Brian Joiner
Guest was Brian Joiner

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Dr. Brian Joiner has since 1997 been
a full-time community volunteer
working toward helping to create a
just and sustainable society. He is co-
founder and President of Sustain
Dane, and formerly served on the
Board of Trustees of Shorewood Hills,
and chair on its Traffic and Storm
Water committees.
Prior to his early retirement Brian
was Chairman and co-owner of Joiner
Associates, a nationally recognized
management consulting firm. Prior to
Joiner Associates, Brian was a UW
professor. He is the author of Fourth Generation Management and
co-author with Peter Scholtes of The Team Handbook, published
by Joiner Associates and one of the best-selling business books of
all time, having now sold over one-and-a-half million copies.
Brian was a protege of W. Edwards Deming and has received the
Deming Medal, the Shewhart Medal, the Hunter Award, the Ott
Award, and the Wilcoxon Prize. In addition, he was one of the
original nine judges of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
Award and one of the originators of the Minitab statistical
software system. Since 1997, Brian has contributed much of his
time to the environment and sustainability working primarily
through the Sustain Dane community. Brian is at this time is
contributing to greater health care solutions through his work at
Joiner Associates LLC.


Transcription of Podcast
Joe: Welcome everyone! This is Joe Dager, the host to the
Business901 Podcast. With me, today is Brian Joiner.
Brian is an accomplished author, consultant and co-
founder of Joiner Associates. Stemming from his
relationships with Dr. Deming and Peter Scholtes, Brian
has had an illustrious career in the quality world with so
many acclamations that it is difficult even to start.

Brian, I would like to welcome you, and I'm honored by
your participation and would like to mention that I
recently re-read Fourth Generation Management and
felt as it was written yesterday. What have you been
doing with yourself recently?

Brian: Well, that's interesting; because I did a little bit back
into Fourth Generation a Month or so ago just to see if
that stuff still made sense and so on. I was pleased
with it because I knew a lot of stuff that I don't know
now. So anyhow, I think it's a pretty well-done book,
and I have to give credit, also, to the person that did a
lot of the actual wording that's in there, Sue Reynard,
she couldn't get credit as a co-author, but I put all the
content in, but she showed me the thing in a way that I
could never have done without her.

What I've been doing is I've been walking through a
little journey I've been on for the last 20 years, maybe
pushing 30. In the 1990's, I really became concerned
about what we were doing to the Earth, and it was
great to do good quality work, very important to do
good quality work, but if we were destroying our only
planet in the process, that didn't make sense to me to
keep doing that.



So I had clients that were major US companies, and all
of them wanted to sell more, sell more, sell more,
expand their markets and sell more to China in
particular. That was the big deal, how much can I sell
to China?

China had a quarter of the earth population. We did a
little math; “If we get everybody in China consuming as
we consume that would be just the destruction of
Earth. I still believe that, and so, it just wasn't stable,
more consumption, more destruction, it just wasn't
going to work.

Deming's basic mantra back behind all of the things
was, "Commerce can lead to prosperity can lead to
peace," but the thing that's missing from that I think is
the impact on the Earth, and then he grew up and lived
in an area where that really wasn't the problem. In his
early years, in Iowa and Wyoming, just to get through
and have enough to eat was a big deal.

So, to get to the place where we had to worry about
what we were doing to the Earth, I don't think he ever
got there. I never heard him talk about that, and I try
to promote it, talk a little bit more about that a couple
of times, but it just wasn't on his radar. So anyhow, it
was on mine. What to do about that wasn't clear.

So it happened that I had a son that was in China. In
the fall of '96, I went to visit him. He was studying
Chinese there. There was an international conference
for quality in Japan. He had gone to that, and from
there went to China, and I could see first-hand the
changes that were happening in China and how

neighborhoods that had existed and functioned pretty
well for people for a long time they were getting
bulldozed and other things were being put up, and it
was US-ifizing, making it look like the US going on
rampant.

We've seen a lot more of that in the years since '96,
but that was, to me, just a real whack on the nail to
say that I had to be concerned about this. So then in
the spring after that, that same son arranged a trip for
me and his twin to go through Nepal, to walk through
Nepal, the mountains of Nepal, for 23 days.

So I did that, and we saw not one wheel in all that
time. It just wasn't an industrialized at all society.
People were carrying things around. They had $200 a
year per capita income, and they had smiles on their
faces.

So I came back to the US, saw people with lots of
consumption, with frowns on their faces and obese and
unhappy, and I said, "There's something wrong with
this way of thinking." I tried to talk with clients that I
had, and at that time, the big environmental issues
that were on the news were the spotted owl and the
Namaqua Dove. You young people probably don't even
know what those things are, but that was the main
things that people were debating what to do about
preserving the habitats of the spotted owls and the
Namaqua Doves.

They would just go to that and wouldn't want to talk
about the big picture that is just a symptom of. So,
what to do? I really did a lot of soul-searching without
helping or without making things work; I don't know

what I was doing. I was flying around, being with these
companies, and putting a lot of CO2 into the air every
time I fly.

I figured I had to do something myself, to reduce my
intakes from the Earth and to help others to think
globally and act globally, and so I wound up leaving
Joiner Associates and selling it. All I did at the time was
to found a small, local organization in the Madison,
Wisconsin area, which is where I've lived for a long
time, called Sustain Dane. Madison is in Dane County,
so the idea is to sustain Dane County.

The notion of doing that was that a good mantra of the
quality of the environmental movement to think
globally and act locally. I was trying to do that, trying
to think globally and act locally; big step in my journey
to leave quality and go into environmental
sustainability.

Joe: That is a pretty interesting journey, and just as I think
Fourth Generation Management was ahead of its time.
Sustainability was ahead of its time because now we're
talking cradle in the grave type consumption, and
starting to look at it. Just recently, I read where GM
has $1 billion savings because recyclability. It is an
interesting journey, and it seems the rest of us may
have just caught up with you. How do quality,
sustainability, how do you see all that being related?

Brian: It is that people are now doing a lot that was sort of
like what we would dream of them doing back in the
90's. It is happening, and companies even find that
they get better customer acceptance from products
that are more sustainable. Lots of good things are

happening now.

If you look at the net of all of it and say, "How is that
impact on the Earth? We impact the Earth a lot less
now than we did then. Are we on the path to keep the
place a good place to live for the next 100 years, 1000
years, whatever? Are we just teasing ourselves a little
bit when we're thinking we're making our progress?"
The answer to that is we're not really there yet.

One of the things you can look at is the whole thing
about the global warming. What's happening with CO2?
What are we doing about that? We've yet to sign the
treaty, but that was done way back in the 90's, I think
it was, to say that we're going to start reducing our
carbon emissions. We just aren't really serious yet.

We've gotten a little bit, and it's, I think a change in
the generation. The people that were kids or young
people back when I was frustrated with the stuff are
now in positions of power. I think the next generation
after that will go further, but it's almost as we'll have to
take this in steps. Pre-school steps, I think, if you really
look at the impact that we're having on things.

Joe: When I review the quality journey, people always talk
about how quickly they can go on a journey of quality,
whether it's lean or something else. I always remind
them that Dr. Deming started in the 50's and really did
realize all of the accomplishments of many of
manufacturers he worked with in Japan till the 80's and
90's.

Brian: They were a lot of ways ahead of us, and people in
Japan have begun to get onto this. They are not as far

ahead in a lot of the sustainability stuff as we are in the
US yet, but I think they'll get there with more agility
than we will.

Joe: What do you look at as the relationship between quality
and sustainability? Do they relate?

Brian: It took me a while to begin to understand and make
that connection in a way that had some depth to it, at
least that meant to me some depth. My best way of
thinking about this at the moment, and I continue to
try to learn about it, is that if you think about
sustainability primarily having to do with externalities,
these are things neither the customer nor the producer
wants to pay for and to create the stuff that we're
putting into the atmosphere, the by-products and so
on.

So those kinds of things are externalities to the
process, and nobody wants to take ownership of those
things and say, "Okay. I'll pony up. I'll pay for that."
Those things are the things we have to do to deal with
relative to sustainability. If you broaden that, and I've
had discussions with some of the leading Japanese
consultants, and they said, "This makes total sense.
How can we call something quality if it's not
sustainable?"

I think they are beginning to get that in Japan and
some of the leading consultants in the US as well, to
say that we have to look at this more broadly.

Brian: Well, the big pictures of my evolution over the last 30
years, 20 years, I don't know.


Joe: A while, as I would put it.

Brian: A good while, 20 years or thereabouts, is that I made
the step from quality to sustainability. I did that, and
I'm still doing that, of course, and still doing quality,
but the thing I've gotten focused on is the health
system because the economic impact of that is liable to
clobber society before these other things do. So now
I'm thinking, okay, now what do we do to deal with this
economic tsunami coming at us from the cost of health
care that is totally, totally out of control.

That's what got me interested and how that all fits.
Because certainly, quality principles can help with other
lives, sustainability, how do we do things with less
impact on the Earth and less impact on other things?
All those basic concepts can tie in together to help.

Joe: I can understand why this has led you to work in these
areas and things just for your passion for yourself. Is
there an underlying theme that drives you in this area?

Brian: When I was a little kid, I was always at my cousin's and
I would have to do some work. They would say that, by
the time I figured out how to do it better, they'd have it
done. I had always been interested in how to do things
better and more effectively. So that is a constant
theme through all this, and I've always hated waste
and anything that was waste was not good. So that's
been a big deal for me through the whole thing.

Joe: Well, I have to ask you because I have been amazed
Bill Hunter and you both being from the Madison area,
and the first, I think, local government really working
on quality area, was probably the Madison city or

county government. I'm not sure which anymore.

Brian: It was the mayor of Madison that did it.

Joe: It was a hotbed for those that were interested in
quality. Why was that?

Brian: First of all, people are often the big factors in these
things, and George Box is still alive, still functioning
and working well. He's 93 now, just completed his
memoirs, and I think you can look for that in the next
six months. It's a beautiful, interesting set of vignettes
from his life.

He's such a great statistician. He revolutionized so
many aspects of statistics in his way of doing things,
and he was a head of the statistics department and
attracted other people. That was the main reason I
came here was because of George Box, way back in the
70's. Bill Hunter is one of his protégés from way back.
George Box really had a big effect. Then, of course, the
tie-in with Deming was another thing.

I've had the incredibly good fortune to share an office
with his (Deming) wife, my first job, when I first
became a professional as a statistician. I got to know
Dr. Deming back in the 60's. It was always a big thing
for me to have had the chance to talk with him face-to-
face, and listen to him, and hear what he was doing
and so on.

Bill Hunter and I started lapping up the wisdom that
was there with Deming. Reading everything he wrote
and having conversations with him on statistics and so
on. That was a big part of things, and George Box, I

think, if it hadn't been for George Box attracting the
talent and the statistic department and Deming being a
statistician, all that might not have happened the way it
did.

Joe: Well, I always find it interesting that most of the people
on the stage with Dr. Deming were statisticians.

Brian: He insisted that statistics were at the heart of this. I
think he probably overemphasized it a little bit, but
maybe not. I don't know. He was a brilliant guy. The
other thing is that not only is it a hotbed for quality,
but you can ask the questions, sometimes it's also a
hotbed for other things, like sustainability.

There are three giants in sustainability. John Muir, one
of the major reasons we had the national park system
we have, and Sequoia Canyon in California, he
firsthand worked to say that he's from this area. He's
from the Madison area. Aldo Leopold, who is famous
among all the people that are environmentalist, has a
book called the Sand County Almanac, which is just a
treasure of little pieces that he wrote about life in the
area and what was sustainable, what wasn't, and
whatever. Then Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth
Day, he is from the Madison area.

We got some of these giants in sustainability that have
come from this area, and I think that part of is just that
Madison seems to be a hotbed for most anything that's
progressive anyhow, and that's my humble opinion of
that.

Joe: It's been very progressive as you just well pointed out.
When you look back on your career, Brian, what jumps

out to you?

Brian: What jumps out to me is how amazing Dr. Deming was.
What he did for us, beginning when he was 80 years
old. Here I am, just turning 75, and in five more years
I'll be in a bed. I don't know how I'll be functioning at
all, but he took on this whole thing. For 13 years, he
was working, not quite day and night but almost. He
was working six and a half days a week to help us get
out of the pit that we were in.

He had a big effect, and I thought, "Where do you get
the energy and ability to do that?" He just was an
amazing man. That's one of the things that sticks out
to me when I think about my career and what I've
done, in the future to do more things and so on. I say,
"Well if he did it..."

Joe: So you're just starting out, right? You just learned what
you needed to learn, and now you're going to start out
and teach us a little bit, maybe.

Brian: I don't know, but it's interesting that I do find that
people think I have wisdom sometimes, and I've never
got accused of that before. They thought I might know
something, but to have something that, every now and
then, something just comes out of my mouth. I don't
know where it came from, but in reflection, from other
people, it was a wise statement. So maybe that's some
wisdom building up over the years.

Joe: And you stopped writing? You would think that the
passion you have with sustainability that you would
have written about that.



Brian: Well, you would think that. I've done a couple of pieces
that are about the connection between quality and
sustainability, nothing major. I don't think I've made
any major contributions or have any special knowledge
about sustainability. I still feel that I'm a learner. I had
a lot of years before the quality thing happened. I'd
been doing statistics and learning about it for years
before that, so I don't feel like I have the same kind of
background in that.

I haven't mentioned the health system we designed.
That is sort of like the third leg of the stool here, which
is that our health system as I said briefly, is an
economic tsunami that's about to overwhelm us if we
don't do something very significant very soon. And so, I
got the call to work on that and said, "Okay, what I do
now if I feel like I really want to try to do something
about that?"

I went got two partners, re-initiated Joiner Associates,
with Tim Harrington and Jim Bower, two other people
from Madison that are just real superstars. We are
setting out to do things that can change the health
system dramatically. Here's a couple of statistics that
show how important this is. 70% of the cost of health
care in the lifetime of a person is associated with
chronic conditions. If we can do something, and it's
been proven that you can help reduce the cost of those
chronic conditions, chronic diseases if you catch them
early and you treat them well early. Take diabetes, for
example. If you can help people reduce the impacts of
their sugar, and do that better, they will wind up with a
much better quality of life and a lot less cost to the
health system.


So Tim Harrington has a book that came out last
January so about a year ago, that is entitled Great
Healthcare: Making it Happen, the co-author, Eric
Newman, from Geisinger. The highlight of that book is
that they have chapters about each of the major
chronic diseases written by an organization that has
made huge strides in reducing the impact of that
disease on the population, and how they manage those
diseases. There's a chapter about diabetes, one about
congestive heart failure, one about kidney failure, etc.,
just a jewel of a set of knowledge there that helps with
that aspect of the health system.

The next point about the health system is that, and this
has been known for some half a dozen years now. On
average, it takes 17 years between an innovation and
getting it sort of implemented, pretty broadly, in the
health system. 17 years are a long time in something
that's got the momentum built up to keep on increasing
costs that the healthcare system does.

If we want to take and make a change in that, make a
significant change in that trajectory, if we wait 17
years, that's going to be too much. So there are things
that, in particular, my two partners are doing now, that
is very innovative, very creative in figuring out how to
get changes introduced more rapidly into the system.

Joe: How would someone learn more about that?

Brian: Start with Tim's book, and look at that, and then we do
have a website, and you can look for that, Joiner
Associates.


Joe: Tim's book, I can find that on Amazon, I assume?

Brian: There are two books by the same name, so you have to
get the one that's by Tim Harrington and Eric Newman.

Joe: I just have to ask you, on a side note, did you develop
the Joiner Plain & Simple book series? Was that yours
or did they just use your name to promote that series?

Brian: No, I came up with the idea for it. I was out consulting.
I said, "You know, people need simple ways to learn
how to do these things, and little templates so they
don't have to go back and try to figure out everything
from scratch. That was genesis of that series.

Joe: I can't say that I have the entire collection, but I have
several of them, and I always thought they were
excellent introductions for anyone.

Brian: I think they're good, really high quality. Rather good
quality stuff guy got done at Joiner Associates without
me having anything left to do with it, which is a
wonderful thing.

Joe: In today's world, does the original seven qualities tool
still fit?

Brian: I think all those things are still very important. Lean, I
think, is very important. I'm not so high on Six Sigma.
One thing that I think Six Sigma made a major
contribution to was the process of construction and
developing capabilities that, from the beginning. They
had this notion that you needed to develop people to
high levels of confidence to help others do this stuff.
They came up with the notion of the black belts and the

greenbelts and so on, and that was a real innovation.

We at Joiner Associates, and the other thing that
happened are that companies, we had one of our
clients at that time got heavily into Six Sigma, one of
the early companies to do that, and we already had a
thing that was like the black belt training, but wasn't
quite as rigorous, and it included more of the people
aspects of consulting and how you get teams to work
together and so on, but it had the basics of it, which
are para-statisticians training, like paramedics and
other things like that.

We had that, but what we never had was the ability to
get the company to put the high potentials into the
course. That's what made that hum, I think, was
special, was that they had the high potentials, learning
and learning by doing it themselves before they go out
and try to help other people, getting good at it
themselves that creates a whole new culture. That was
a big, big impact from the Six Sigma. I think that the
content of it is okay. Lean has much better content,
and I think they had better content even in the
beginning approaches. We didn't have that access to
the high potentials to make that work.

Joe: Well, I've always been amazed at your work. I
mentioned the Joiner Plain & Simple Series, the Seven
Step Joiner problem-solving method that has been
popularized your work with Peter Scholtes using CAP-
Do instead of PDCA.

Brian: I think that those things are, I mean, that comes from
Japan and the Japanese taught me that, and I learned
so much from them. I had some very esteemed

colleagues. One of the good things that happened early
on was that some of the Japanese consultants, the best
ones that are in charge of the Deming prize, things like
that, and were curious about what Deming was talking
about these days, and so they tried to find a way to
find out what was going on in the US with Deming.

We were the lucky ones that they happened to choose
to be their portal to what Deming was doing. We
developed this very strong relationship with a number
of the leading Japanese consultants and a number of
the Deming acolyte consultants in the US that started
meeting in the late 80's. We started meeting and we
still do. I don't go very regular, now, because of the
CO2, but they still meet now and it's called A Global
Quality Futures Workshop, and the who's who, in my
opinion, of the best consultants in Japan and some of
the best in the US are the members.

It's a small group, 20 or 30 people included in this
thing. We learned so much from the Japanese early on.
I had those connections, and I always want to give
credit to them because they knew a lot, and they
helped us learn things, and they learned things from
us.

Joe: Brian, I would like to thank you very much. I
appreciate it. This podcast will be available on the
Business901 iTunes store and the Business901 blog
site, so thanks again, Brian.

Brian: Thank you very much.



Joe Dager is president of Business901, a
firm specializing in bringing the continuous
improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process
thinking of over thirty years in marketing
within a wide variety of industries and
applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean
Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
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Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901


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